Wireman

I

The first time Wireman and I actually met he laughed so hard he broke the chair he was sitting in, and I laughed so hard I almost fainted — did in fact go into that half-swooning state that’s called “a gray-out.” That was the last thing I would have expected a day after finding out that Tom Riley was having an affair with my ex-wife (not that my evidence would have stood up in any court of law), but it was an augury of things to come. It wasn’t the only time we laughed together. Wireman was many things to me — not least of all my fate — but most of all, he was my friend.

Ii

“So, ” he said, when I finally reached his table with the striped umbrella shading it and the empty chair across from his own. “The limping stranger arriveth, bearing a bread-bag filled with shells. Sit down, limping stranger. Wet thy whistle. That glass has been waiting for some days now.”

I put my plastic bag — it was indeed a bread-bag — on the table and reached across to him. “Edgar Freemantle.”

His hand was short, the fingers blunt, the grip strong. “Jerome Wireman. I go by Wireman, mostly.”

I looked at the beach chair meant for me. It was the kind with a high back and a low fanny-sling, like the bucket seat in a Porsche.

“Something wrong with that, muchacho? ” Wireman asked, raising an eyebrow. He had a lot of eyebrow to raise, tufted and half-gray.

“Not as long as you don’t laugh when I have to get out of it, ” I said.

He smiled. “Honey, live like you got to live. Chuck Berry, nineteen sixty-nine.”

I positioned myself beside the empty chair, said a little prayer, and dropped. I leaned left as always, to spare my bad hip. I didn’t land quite square, but I grabbed the wooden arms, pushed with my strong foot, and the chair only teetered. A month before I would have spilled, but I was stronger now. I could imagine Kathi Green applauding.

“Good job, Edgar, ” he said. “Or are you an Eddie? ”

“Pick your poison, I answer to either. What might you have in that pitcher? ”

“Iced green tea, ” he said. “Very cooling. Try some? ”

“I’d love to.”

He poured me a glass, then topped up his own and raised it. The tea was only faintly green. His eyes, caught in fine nets of wrinkles, were greener. His hair was black, streaking in white at the temples, and quite long indeed. When the wind lifted it, I could see a scar at the top of his hairline on the right side, coin-shaped but smaller. He was wearing a bathing suit today, and his legs were as brown as his arms. He looked fit, but I thought he also looked tired.

“Let’s drink to you, muchacho. You made it.”

“All right, ” I said. “To me.”

We clinked glasses and drank. I’d had green tea before and thought it was okay, but this was heavenly — like drinking cold silk, with just a faint tang of sweetness.

“Do you taste the honey? ” he asked, and smiled when I nodded. “Not everyone does. I just put in a tablespoonful per pitcher. It releases the natural sweetness of the tea. I learned that cooking on a tramp steamer in the China Sea.” He held up his glass and squinted through it. “We fought off many pirates and mated with strange and dusky women ’neath tropic skies.”

“That sounds a trifle bullshitty to me, Mr. Wireman.”

He laughed. “I actually read about the honey thing in one of Miss Eastlake’s cookery books.”

“Is she the lady you come out with in the mornings? The one in the wheelchair? ”

“Indeed she is.”

And without thinking much about what I was saying — it was her enormous blue sneakers propped up on the chrome footrests of her wheelchair I was thinking about — I said: “The Bride of the Godfather.”

Wireman gaped, those green eyes of his so wide I was about to apologize for my faux pas. Then he really began to laugh. It was the kind of balls-to-the-wall bellowing you give out on those rare occasions when something sneaks past all your defenses and gets to the sweet spot of your funnybone. I mean the man was busting a gut, and when he saw I didn’t have the slightest idea what had gotten him, he laughed even harder, his not inconsiderable belly heaving. He tried to put his glass back on the little table and missed. The glass plummeted straight down to the sand and stuck there, perfectly upright, like a cigarette-butt in one of those urns of sand you used to see beside the elevators in hotel lobbies. That struck him even funnier, and he pointed at it.

“I couldn’t have done that if I was trying! ” he managed, and then was off again, gale upon gale, heaving in his chair, one hand clutching his stomach, the other planted on his chest. A snatch of poetry read in high school, over thirty years before, suddenly came back to me with haunting clarity: Men do not sham convulsion, Nor simulate a throe.

I was smiling myself, smiling and chuckling, because that kind of high hilarity is catching, even when you don’t know what the joke is. And the glass falling that way, with every drop of Wireman’s tea staying inside… that was funny. Like a gag in a Road Runner cartoon. But the plummeting glass hadn’t been the source of Wireman’s hilarity.

“I don’t get it. I mean I’m sorry if I—”

“She sort of is! ” Wireman cried, cackling so crazily he was almost incoherent. “She sort of is, that’s the thing! Only it’s daughter, of course, she’s The Daughter of the Godfa—”

But he had been rocking from side to side as well as up and down — no sham, authentic throe — and that was when his beach chair finally gave up the ghost with a loud crrrack, first snapping him forward with an extremely comical look of surprise on his face and then spilling him onto the sand. One of his flailing arms caught the post of the umbrella and upended the table. A gust of wind caught the umbrella, puffed it like a sail, and began to drag the table down the beach. What got me laughing wasn’t the bug-eyed look of amazement on Wireman’s face when his disintegrating beach chair tried to clamp on him like a striped jaw, nor his sudden barrel-roll onto the sand. It wasn’t even the sight of that table trying to escape, tugged by its own umbrella. It was Wireman’s glass, still standing placidly upright between the sprawling man’s side and left arm.

Acme Iced Tea Company, I thought, still stuck on those old Road Runner cartoons. Meep-meep! And that, of course, made me think of the crane that had done the damage, the one with the fucked-up beeper that hadn’t beeped, and all at once I saw myself as Wile E. Coyote in the cab of my disintegrating pickup truck, eyes bugged in bewilderment, frazzled ears sticking off in two opposite directions and maybe smoking a little at the tips.

That did it. I laughed until I rolled bonelessly out of my own chair and plopped onto the sand beside Wireman… but I also missed the glass, which still stood perfectly upright like a cigarette-butt in an urn of sand. It was impossible for me to laugh any harder, but I did. Tears gushed down my cheeks and the world had begun to dim out as my brain went into oxygen-deprivation mode.

Wireman, still howling, went crawling after his runaway table, locomoting on knees and elbows. He made a grab for the base and it skittered away as if sensing his approach. Wireman plowed face-first into the sand and came up laughing and sneezing. I rolled over on my back and gasped for breath, on the verge of passing out but still laughing.

That was how I met Wireman.

Iii

Twenty minutes later the table had been placed in a rough approximation of its original position. That was all very well, but neither of us could look at the umbrella without breaking into fits of the giggles. One of its pie-wedges was torn, and it now rose crookedly from the table, giving it the look of a drunken man trying to pretend he’s sober. Wireman had moved the remaining chair down to the end of the wooden walk, and had taken it at my insistence. I was sitting on the walk itself, which, although backless, would make getting up an easier (not to mention more dignified) proposition. Wireman had offered to replace the spilled pitcher of iced tea with a fresh one. I refused this, but agreed to split the miraculously unspilled glass with him.

“Now we’re water-brothers, ” he said when it was gone.

“Is that some Indian ritual? ” I asked.

“Nope, from Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein. Bless his memory.”

It occurred to me that I’d never seen him reading as he sat in his striped chair, but I didn’t mention it. Lots of people don’t read on the beach; the glare gives them headaches. I sympathized with people who got headaches.

He began to laugh again. He covered his mouth with both hands — like a child — but the laughter burst through. “No more. Jesus, no more. I feel like I sprung every muscle in my stomach.”

“Me too, ” I said.

For a moment we said nothing more. The breeze off the Gulf was cool and fresh that day, with a rueful salt tang. The rip in the umbrella flapped. The dark spot on the sand where the iced tea pitcher had spilled was already almost dry.

He snickered. “Did you see the table trying to escape? The fucking table? ”

I also snickered. My hip hurt and my stomach-muscles ached, but I felt pretty good for a man who had almost laughed himself unconscious. “‘Alabama Getaway, ’” I said.

He nodded, still wiping sand from his face. “Grateful Dead. Nineteen seventy-nine. Or thereabouts.” He giggled, the giggle broadened into a chuckle, and the chuckle became another bellow of full-throated laughter. He held his belly and groaned. “I can’t, I have to stop, but… Bride of the Godfather! Jesus! ” And he was off again.

“Don’t you ever tell her I said that, ” I said.

He quit laughing, but not smiling. “I ain’t that indiscreet, muchacho. But… it was the hat, right? That big straw hat she wears. Like Marlon Brando in the garden, playing with the little kid.”

It had actually been as much the sneakers, but I nodded and we laughed some more.

“If we crack up when I introduce you, ” he said (cracking up again, probably at the idea of cracking up; it goes that way when the fit is on you), “we’re gonna say it’s because I broke my chair, right? ”

“Right, ” I said. “What did you mean when you said she sort of is? ”

“You really don’t know? ”

“No clue.”

He pointed at Big Pink, which was looking very small in the distance. Looking like a long walk back. “Who do you think owns your place, amigo? I mean, I’m sure you pay a real estate agent, or Vacation Homes Be Us, but where do you think the balance of your check finally ends up? ”

“I’m going to guess in Miss Eastlake’s bank account.”

“Correct. Miss Elizabeth Eastlake. Given the lady’s age — eighty-five — I guess you could call her Ole Miss.” He began laughing again, shook his head, and said: “I have to stop. But in fairness to myself, it’s been a long time since I had anything to belly-laugh about.”

“Same here.”

He looked at me — armless, all patchy-haired on one side — and nodded. Then for a little while we just looked out at the Gulf. I know that people come to Florida when they’re old and sick because it’s warm pretty much year-round, but I think the Gulf of Mexico has something else going for it. Just looking into that mild flat sunlit calm is healing. It’s a big word, isn’t it? Gulf, I mean. Big enough to drop a lot of things into and watch them disappear.

After awhile Wireman said, “And who do you think owns the houses between your place and this one? ” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the white walls and orange tile. “Which, by the way, is listed on the county plat-maps as Heron’s Roost and I call El Palacio de Asesinos. ”

“Would that also be Miss Eastlake? ”

“You’re two for two, ” he said.

“Why do you call it Palace of Assassins? ”

“Well, it’s ‘Outlaw Hideout’ when I think in English, ” Wireman said with an apologetic smile. “Because it looks like the place where the head bad guy in a Sam Peckinpah Western would hang his hat. Anyway, you’ve got six rather nice homes between Heron’s Roost and Salmon Point—”

“Which I call Big Pink, ” I said. “When I think in English.”

He nodded. “ El Rosado Grande. Good name. I like it. You’ll be there… how long? ”

“I have the place for a year, but I honestly don’t know. I’m not afraid of hot weather — I guess they call it the mean season — but there’s hurricanes to consider.”

“Yep, down here we all consider hurricane season, especially since Charley and Katrina. But the houses between Salmon Point and Heron’s Roost will be empty long before hurricane season. Like the rest of Duma Key. Which could as easily have been called Eastlake Island, by the way.”

“Are you saying this is all hers? ”

“That’s complicated even for a guy like me, who was a lawyer in his other life, ” Wireman said. “Once upon a time her father owned it all, along with a good swatch of the Florida mainland east of here. He sold everything in the thirties except for Duma. Miss Eastlake does own the north end, of that there is no doubt.” Wireman waved his arm to indicate the northern tip of the island, the part he would later characterize as being as bald as a stripper’s pussy. “The land and the houses on it, from Heron’s Roost — the most luxurious — to your Big Pink, the most adventurous. They bring her an income she hardly needs, because her father also left her and her siblings mucho dinero. ”

“How many of her brothers and sisters are still—”

“None, ” Wireman said. “The Daughter of the Godfather is the last.” He snorted and shook his head. “I have to quit calling her that, ” he said, more to himself than to me.

“If you say so. What I really wonder about is why the rest of the island isn’t developed. Given the never-ending housing and building boom in Florida, that’s seemed insane to me from the first day I crossed the bridge.”

“You speak like a man with specialized knowledge. What are you in your other life, Edgar? ”

“A building contractor.”

“And those days are behind you now? ”

I could have hedged — I didn’t know him well enough to put myself on the line — but I didn’t. I’m sure our mutual fit of hysterics had a lot to do with that. “Yes, ” I said.

“And what are you in this life? ”

I sighed and looked away from him. Out at the Gulf, where you could put all your old miseries and watch them disappear without a trace. “Can’t tell yet for sure. I’ve been doing some painting.” And waited for him to laugh.

He didn’t. “You wouldn’t be the first painter to stay at Salm… Big Pink. It has quite an artistic history.”

“You’re kidding.” There was nothing in the house to suggest such a thing.

“Oh yes, ” he said. “Alexander Calder stayed there. Keith Haring. Marcel Duchamp. All back before beach erosion put the place in danger of falling into the water.” He paused. “Salvador Dalí.”

“No shucking way! ” I cried, then flushed when he cocked his head. For a moment I felt all the old frustrated rage rush in, seeming to clog my head and throat. I can do this, I thought. “Sorry. I had an accident awhile back, and—” Then I stopped.

“Not hard to figure that one out, ” Wireman said. “In case you didn’t notice, you’re short a gizmo on the right side, muchacho. ”

“Yes. And sometimes I get… I don’t know… aphasic, I guess.”

“Uh-huh. In any case, I tell no lie about Dalí. He stayed in your house for three weeks in nineteen eighty-one.” Then, with hardly a pause: “I know what you’re going through.”

“I seriously doubt that.” I didn’t mean to sound harsh, but that was how it sounded. That was how I felt, actually.

Wireman said nothing for a little while. The torn umbrella flapped. I had time to think, Well this was a potentially interesting friendship that’s not going to happen, but when he next spoke, his voice was calm and pleasant. It was as if our little side-trip had never occurred.

“Part of Duma’s development problem is simple overgrowth. The sea oats belong, but the rest of that shit has no business growing without irrigation. Somebody better investigate, that’s what I think.”

“My daughter and I went exploring one day. It looked like outright jungle south of here.”

Wireman looked alarmed. “Duma Key Road’s no excursion for a guy in your condition. It’s in shit shape.”

“Tell me about it. What I want to know is how come it isn’t four lanes wide with bike-paths on both sides and condos every eight hundred yards.”

“Because no one knows who owns the land? How about that, for a start? ”

“You serious? ”

“Yup. Miss Eastlake has owned from the tip of the island south to Heron’s Roost free and clear since 1950. About that there’s absolutely no doubt. It was in the wills.”

“ Wills? Plural? ”

“Three of them. All holographic, all witnessed by different people, all different when it comes to Duma Key. All of them, however, make the north end of Duma a no-strings bequest to Elizabeth Eastlake from her father, John. The rest has been in the courts ever since. Sixty years of squabbling that makes Bleak House look like Dick and Jane.”

“I thought you said all Miss Eastlake’s siblings were dead.”

“They are, but she has nieces and nephews and grandnieces and grandnephews. Like Sherwin-Williams Paint, they cover the earth. They’re the ones doing the squabbling, but they squabble with each other, not her. Her only mention in the old man’s multiple wills had to do with this piece of Duma Key, which was carefully marked off by two surveying companies, one just before World War II and one just after. This is all a matter of public record. And do you know what, amigo? ”

I shook my head.

“Miss Eastlake thinks that’s exactly what her old man wanted to happen. And, having cast my lawyerly eye over copies of the wills, so do I.”

“Who pays the taxes? ”

He looked surprised, then laughed. “I enjoy you more and more, vato. ”

“My other life, ” I reminded him. I was already liking the sound of that other-life thing.

“Right. Then you’ll appreciate this, ” he said. “It’s clever. All three of John Eastlake’s last wills and testaments contained identical clauses setting up a trust fund to pay the taxes. The original investment company administering the trust has been absorbed since then — in fact the absorbing company has been absorbed—”

“It’s the way America does business, ” I said.

“It is indeed. In any case, the fund has never been in danger of going broke and the taxes are paid like clockwork every year.”

“Money talks, bullshit walks.”

“It’s the truth.” He stood up, put his hands in the small of his back, and twisted it. “Would you like to come up to the house and meet the boss? She should be arising from her nap just about now. She has her problems, but even at eighty-five she’s quite the babe.”

This wasn’t the time to tell him I thought I already had met her — briefly — courtesy of my answering machine. “Another day. When the hilarity subsides.”

He nodded. “Walk down tomorrow afternoon, if you like.”

“Maybe I will. It’s been real.” I held out my hand again. He shook it again, looking at the stump of my right arm as he did so.

“No prosthesis? Or do you just leave it off when you’re not among the hoi polloi? ”

I had a story I told people about that — nerve-pain in the stump — but it was a lie, and I didn’t want to lie to Wireman. Partly because he had a nose attuned to the delicate smell of bullshit, but mostly because I just didn’t want to lie to him.

“I was measured for one while I was still in the hospital, of course, and I got the hard sell on it from just about everyone — especially my physical therapist and this psychologist friend of mine. They said the quicker I learned to use it, the quicker I’d be able to get on with my life—”

“Just put the whole thing behind you and go on dancing—”

“Yes.”

“Only sometimes putting a thing behind you isn’t so easy to do.”

“No.”

“Sometimes it’s not even right, ” Wireman said.

“That isn’t it, exactly, but it’s…” I trailed off and seesawed my hand in the air.

“Close enough for rock and roll? ”

“Yes, ” I said. “Thanks for the cold drink.”

“Come on back and get another one. I only take the sun between two and three — an hour a day is enough for me — but Miss Eastlake either sleeps or rearranges her china figurines most of the afternoon, and of course she never misses Oprah, so I have time. More than I know what to do with, actually. Who knows? We might find a lot to talk about.”

“All right, ” I said. “Sounds good.”

Wireman grinned. It made him handsome. He offered his hand and I shook with him again. “You know what I think? Friendships founded on laughter are always fortuitous.”

“Maybe your next job will be writing the fortunes in Chinese cookies, ” I said.

“There could be worse jobs, muchacho. Far worse.”

Iv

Walking back, my thoughts turned to Miss Eastlake, an old lady in big blue sneakers and a wide straw hat who just happened to own (sort of) her own Florida Key. Not the Bride of the Godfather after all, but Daughter of the Land Baron and, apparently, Patroness of the Arts. My mind had done another of those weird slip-slides and I couldn’t remember her father’s name (something simple, only one syllable), but I remembered the basic situation as Wireman had outlined it. I’d never heard of anything similar, and when you build for a living, you see all sorts of strange property arrangements. I thought it was actually rather ingenious… if, that was, you wanted to keep most of your little kingdom in a state of undeveloped grace. The question was, why?

I was most of the way back to Big Pink before I realized my leg was aching like a bastard. I limped inside, slurped water directly from the kitchen tap, then made my way across the living room to the main bedroom. I saw the light on the answering machine was blinking, but I wanted nothing to do with messages from the outside world right then. All I wanted was to get off my feet.

I lay down and looked at the slowly revolving blades of the overhead fan. I hadn’t done very well explaining my lack of a fake arm. I wondered if Wireman would’ve had better luck with What’s a lawyer doing as a rich old spinster’s houseman? What kind of other life is that?

Still considering this, I drifted off into a dreamless and very satisfying nap.

V

When I woke up, I took a hot shower, then went into the living room to check my answering machine. I wasn’t as stiff as I had expected, given my two-mile walk. I might get up tomorrow hobbling, but for tonight I thought I was going to be all right.

The message was from Jack. He said his mother had connected him with someone named Dario Nannuzzi, and Nannuzzi would be happy to look at my pictures between four and five PM on Friday afternoon — could I bring no more than ten of those I considered best to the Scoto Gallery? No sketches; Nannuzzi only wanted to see finished work.

I felt a tickle of unease at this —

No, that’s not even close to what I felt.

My stomach cramped and I could have sworn my bowels dropped three inches. Nor was that the worst. That half-itch, half-pain swarmed up my right side and down the arm that was no longer there. I told myself such feelings — which amounted to three-days-in-advance flop-sweat — were stupid. I had once made a ten-million-dollar pitch to the St. Paul City Council, which at that time had included a man who’d gone on to become the Governor of Minnesota. I’d seen two girls through first dance recitals, cheerleading tryouts, driving lessons, and the hell of adolescence. What was showing some of my paintings to an art gallery guy compared to that?

Nevertheless, I made my way up the stairs to Little Pink with leaden heels.

The sun was going down, flooding the big room with gorgeous and improbable tangerine light, but I felt no urge to try and capture it — not this evening. The light called to me, just the same. As the photograph of some long-gone love, happened on by accident while going through an old box of souvenirs, may call to you. And the tide was in. Even upstairs I could hear the grinding voice of the shells. I sat down and began poking at the clutter of items on my junk-table — a feather, a water-smoothed stone, a disposable lighter rinsed to an anonymous gray. Now it wasn’t Emily Dickinson I thought of, but some old folksong: Don’t the sun look good, Mama, shinin through the trees. No trees out there, of course, but I could put one on the horizon if I wanted to. I could put one out there for the red sunset to shine through. Hello, Dalí.

I wasn’t afraid of being told I had no talent. I was afraid of Signor Nannuzzi telling me I had a leetle talent. Of having him hold his thumb and forefinger maybe a quarter of an inch apart and advising me to reserve a space at the Venice Sidewalk Art Festival, that I would certainly find success there, many tourists would surely be taken by my charming Dalí imitations.

And if he did that, held his thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch apart and said leetle, what did I do then? Could some stranger’s verdict take away my new confidence in myself, steal my peculiar new joy?

“Maybe, ” I said.

Yes. Because painting pictures wasn’t like putting up shopping malls.

The easiest thing would be just to cancel the appointment… except I’d sort of promised Ilse, and I wasn’t in the habit of breaking the promises I made to my children.

My right arm was still itching, itching almost hard enough to hurt, but I barely noticed. There were eight or nine canvases lined up against the wall to my left. I turned toward them, thinking I’d try to decide which ones were best, but I never so much as looked at them.

Tom Riley was standing at the head of the stairs. He was naked except for a pair of light blue pajama pants, darker at the crotch and down the inside of one leg, where he had wet them. His right eye was gone. There was a matted socket full of red and black gore where it had been. Dried blood streaked back along his right temple like war paint, disappearing into graying hair above his ear. His other eye stared out at the Gulf of Mexico. Carnival sunset swam over his narrow, pallid face.

I shrieked in surprise and terror, recoiled, and fell off my chair. I landed on my bad hip and yelled out again, this time from pain. I jerked and my foot struck the chair I’d been sitting in, knocking it over. When I looked toward the stairs again, Tom was gone.

Vi

Ten minutes later I was downstairs, dialing his home number. I had descended the stairs from Little Pink in the sitting position, thumping down one riser at a time on my ass. Not because I’d hurt my hip falling off the chair, but because my legs were trembling so badly I didn’t trust myself on my feet. I was afraid I might take a header, even going down backward so I could clutch the banister with my left hand. Hell, I was afraid I might faint.

I kept remembering the day at Lake Phalen I’d turned to see Tom with that unnatural shine in his eyes, Tom trying not to embarrass me by actual bawling. Boss, I can’t get used to seeing you this way… I’m so sorry.

The telephone began to ring in Tom’s nice Apple Valley home. Tom, who’d been married and divorced twice, Tom who had advised me against moving out of the house in Mendota Heights — It’s like giving up home field advantage in a playoff game, he’d said. Tom who’d gone on to enjoy my home field quite a little bit himself, if Friends with Benefits were to be believed… and I did believe it.

I believed what I’d seen upstairs, too.

One ring… two… three.

“Come on, ” I muttered. “Pick the motherfucker up.” I didn’t know what I’d say if he did, and didn’t care. All I wanted right then was to hear his voice.

I did, but on a recording. “Hi, you’ve reached Tom Riley, ” he said. “My brother George and I are off with our mother, on our annual cruise — it’s Nassau this year. What do you say, Mother? ”

“That I’m a Bahama Mama! ” said a cigarette-cracked but undeniably cheerful voice.

“That’s right, she is, ” Tom resumed. “We’ll be back February eighth. In the meantime, you can leave a message… when, George? ”

“At the zound of the zeep! ” cried a male voice.

“Right! ” Tom agreed. “Zound of the zeep. Or you can call my office.” He gave the number, and then all three of them said “BON VOYAGE! ”

I hung up without saying anything. It hadn’t sounded like the outgoing message of a man contemplating suicide, but of course he had been with his nearest and dearest (the ones who, later on, were most apt to say “He seemed fine”), and —

“Who says it’s going to be suicide? ” I asked the empty room… and then looked around fearfully to make sure it was empty. “Who says it might not be an accident? Or even murder? Assuming it hasn’t happened already? ”

But if it had already happened, someone would probably have called me. Maybe Bozie, but most likely Pam. Also…

“It’s suicide.” This time telling the room. “It’s suicide and it hasn’t happened yet. That was a warning.”

I got up and crutched into the bedroom. I’d been using the crutch less lately, but I wanted it tonight, indeed I did.

My best girl was propped against the pillows on the side of the bed that would have belonged to a real woman, if I’d still had one. I sat down, picked her up and looked into those big blue peepers, so full of cartoon surprise: Ouuuu, you nasty man! My Reba, who looked like Lucy Ricardo.

“It was like Scrooge getting visited by the Ghost of Christmas Yet-To-Come, ” I told her. “‘These are things that may be.’”

Reba offered no opinion on this idea.

“But what do I do? That wasn’t like the paintings. That wasn’t like the paintings at all! ”

But it was, and I knew it. Both paintings and visions originated in the human brain, and something in my brain had changed. I thought the change had come about as a result of just the right combination of injuries. Or the wrong one. Contracoup. Broca’s area. And Duma Key. The Key was… what?

“Amplifying it, ” I told Reba. “Isn’t it? ”

She offered no opinion.

“There’s something here, and it’s acting on me. Is it possible it even called me? ”

The notion made me break out in gooseflesh. Beneath me, the shells ground together as the waves lifted them and dropped them. It was all too easy to imagine skulls instead of shells, thousands of them, all gnashing their teeth at once when the waves came in.

Was it Jack who had said there was another house somewhere out there in the toolies, falling apart? I thought so. When Ilse and I tried to drive that way, the road had gone bad in a hurry. So had Ilse’s stomach. My own gut had been okay, but the stink of the encroaching flora had been nasty and the itch in my missing arm had been worse. Wireman had looked alarmed when I told him about our attempted exploration. Duma Key Road’s no excursion for a guy in your condition, he’d said. The question was, exactly what was my condition?

Reba went on offering no opinion.

“I don’t want this to be happening, ” I said softly.

Reba only stared up at me. I was a nasty man, that was her opinion.

“What good are you? ” I asked, and threw her aside. She landed face-down on her pillow with her bottom up and her pink cotton legs spread, looking quite the little slut. Ouuuu you nasty man, indeed.

I dropped my head, looked at the carpet between my knees, and rubbed the nape of my neck. The muscles there were tight and knotted. They felt like iron. I hadn’t had one of my bad headaches in awhile, but if those muscles didn’t loosen soon, I’d be having a whopper tonight. I needed to eat something, that would be a start. Something comforting. One of those calorie-stuffed frozen dinners sounded about right — the kind where you slice the wrapping over the frozen meat and gravy, blast it for seven minutes in the microwave, then chow down like a motherfucker.

But I sat still awhile longer. I had many questions, and most were probably beyond my ability to answer. I recognized that and accepted it. I had learned to accept a lot since the day I’d had my confrontation with the crane. But I thought I had to try for at least one answer before I could bring myself to eat, hungry as I was. The phone on the bedtable had come with the house. It was charmingly old-fashioned, the Princess model with a rotary dial. It sat on a directory that was mostly Yellow Pages. I turned to the skinny white section, thinking I wouldn’t find Elizabeth Eastlake listed, but I did. I dialed the number. It rang twice and then Wireman answered.

“Hello, Eastlake residence.”

There was hardly a trace in that perfectly modulated voice of the man who had laughed hard enough to break his chair, and all at once this seemed like the world’s worst idea, but I saw no other option.

“Wireman? This is Edgar Freemantle. I need help.”